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On Thursday, Amazon revealed the Amazon Echo, a tube-shaped device meant to work as a voice-driven home assistant. The device is priced at $199 and currently requires an invite to purchase. The Echo will come equipped with seven microphones, a downward-facing array of speakers, and a constant connection to the cloud so that it can listen to and respond to users' spoken questions and requests.

The device's debut video demonstration (below) came complete with a perky, suburban mom-dad-and-two-kids family, and it showed the actors using the Echo to do things like turn on music, tell the time, spell words, play morning news clips from NPR, set a timer, or add items to a shopping list—essentially, the kinds of commands users of Apple's Siri are already familiar with.

Users must say a "trigger" word to enable Echo's listening. As if to head off privacy concerns, the Amazon ad insisted that the Echo only begins listening and recording audio when it hears that word (in the ad, that word is "Alexa," though the product description didn't clarify whether users can pick their own trigger word or not; for now, we hope nobody in your family is named Alexa). Though the advertisement claimed that the always-on device can hear users at most any volume level, it also showed the Echo being moved and plugged into many different rooms in the actors' home, as if to indicate that users need to be close to the Echo for maximum effectiveness.

In terms of tasks like music playback, the Echo will require a Bluetooth connection to a compatible media device, though it's not clear whether that is conditional to connecting to the official Amazon Echo app, which will eventually launch on Amazon Fire OS and Android. (The device's official page also mentions compatibility with a desktop and iOS Web browser interface, though it doesn't clarify whether that method will limit the ways that users interact with it.)

Recent Fire devices have launched with voice-search functionality, which may have fueled Amazon's push into personal-assistant territory. But the Echo reveal didn't hint at a standalone app that smartphone and tablet users might use in place of this always-on, wall-plugged device. We have reached out to Amazon about product availability, and we look forward to testing everything else advertised about the Amazon Echo, including its ability to hear words at almost any volume in a nearby vicinity, its response speed, and its intelligence.